ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?
In the first few pages of The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart, this is the newspaper advertisement that Reynie Muldoon, an eleven-year-old living in Stonetown Orphanage, decides to answer. When Reynie arrives at the testing site with his pencil in hand, he must pass a [...]
Archive for the ‘Children's / YA Lit’ Category
The Mysterious Benedict Society
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on August 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
A Great and Terrible Beauty
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Contemporary, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on July 1, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, Gemma Doyle is sixteen in the year 1895. She has spent her life in India, but now that she has reached the age when most young women appear in society, she longs to go to London, and can’t understand why her mother refuses to allow it. Be [...]
Surrender
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on June 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I had never heard of Sonya Hartnett until A Devoted Reader blogged about Hartnett’s novel Of a boy (aka What the Birds See) back in March. What she said sounded so good that I put Hartnett on my TBR list immediately, and when I went, list in hand, to the library, Surrender was the first [...]
The Game
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on June 14, 2009 | 9 Comments »
I absolutely adore Diana Wynne Jones. As far as I’m concerned, she may be the very best writer of fantasy for children and young adults that there is. Fire and Hemlock stands out as one of my all-time favorite YA books (based on the ballad of Tam Lin), and her Homeward Bounders, Dogsbody, Howl’s Moving [...]
The Little White Horse
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on May 6, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I consider myself a fan of Elizabeth Goudge, but that fan status (fanship? fanhood? fanaticism?) is really based only on countless re-reads of a few of her books: the trilogy about the Eliot family of Damerosehay, Linnets and Valerians, and The Dean’s Watch. This mostly means to me that I have the enormous delight in [...]
Linnets and Valerians (re-read)
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment »
It’s rare, though not vanishingly rare, to find an author who writes equally well for adults and children. Usually the writer’s strength is in one domain or the other. But Elizabeth Goudge, one of my very favorite authors, has marvelous books like The Bird in the Tree, The Dean’s Watch, and The Heart of the [...]
The Children of Green Knowe
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Classics, Fiction on April 1, 2009 | 7 Comments »
In one sense, I was really well-read as a child. I spent virtually all my time reading — had to be forced into the playground — and I roamed my library at my own sweet will. In some other ways, though, I wasn’t very well-read at all, because I had a tendency to read the [...]
The Tale of Despereaux
Posted in Bookish films, Children's / YA Lit, Speculative Fiction on March 29, 2009 | 10 Comments »
I got out of the habit of reading children’s books years ago, not because I decided I outgrew them or lost interest, but mostly because they weren’t on my radar. A children’s book would have to become a phenomenon for me to notice it. So even though Kate DiCamillo’s novel The Tale of Despereaux won [...]
The Giver
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on March 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »
The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is another one of the famous Newbery winners that I managed to miss reading in elementary school (along with Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Island of the Blue Dolphins), although this time I don’t have to take the blame: The Giver was written in 1993, three years after I [...]
The Boy Who Reversed Himself (abandoned)
Posted in Abandoned, Children's / YA Lit, Speculative Fiction on March 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This book has been sitting around on my shelf since I got it from Bookmooch ages ago. William Sleator is one of the great science fiction writers for young adults — The Green Futures of Tycho and Interstellar Pig, just for instance, are fascinating and unexpected novels — and I expected The Boy Who Reversed [...]
